It many industries, manufacturers warehouse spare parts and other goods that customers can order for delivery directly or through intermediaries such as repair shops or distributors. In order to ensure short delivery times, a supplier can ship from the closest one of a number, preferably a high number, of geographically dispersed, each well stocked. However, this can get expensive, and can unduly increase the cost of the goods to the customer. On the other hand, keeping only a single facility or a small number of facilities, works against short delivery times and low shipping charges. This is exacerbated when the supplier services a worldwide market, where both delivery times and shipping charges can vary greatly depending on the customer's location. It is important, therefore, to find ways to reconcile these conflicting requirements, particularly where the supplier services a worldwide market, in a manner that benefits both the supplier and the customer.
The assignee hereof has found an efficacious solution to this dilemma and has been using it for more than a year. It involves shipping to customers in this country from an overseas location, but doing this in a special way. The good ordered by a customer that business day are packaged in a separate package addressed to that customer, as is conventional, but then these individually addressed packages are bundled into a single international shipment. This is shipped by air that day, using an independent shipping entity such as UPS. After clearing customs, the bundled package is divided into individual packages and these are shipped in the same manner as if they started out from a supplier facility in this country and were handed to a shipping entity such as UPS in this country. In this manner, the goods get to this country and clear customs quickly and conveniently and at a lower cost than if shipped as individual orders. In addition, the supplier can maintain a warehouse facility in this country for some goods, but it need not be as fully stocked as the overseas warehouse.
From the customer's point of view, this operates as though the order was shipped from a warehouse in the United States. The customer is invoiced for shipping charges as though the goods were shipped from a location in the United States, for example at the rate a shipper such as UPS would charge for a shipment of the appropriate size and weight from a location in the U.S. to the zone where the customer is located. From the supplier's (e.g., manufacturer's) point of view, this makes it possible to warehouse all, or most, of the spare parts and supplies for customers in the U.S. at a location close to the manufacturing facilities (e.g., in Japan), and make a long term arrangement with the shipper that would result in overall shipping charges to the supplier that are less than the cumulative charge the shipper would require for shipping individual packages from the overseas location to customers in the United States. The supplier can thus achieve many of the benefits of supplying from a location in the U.S. without incurring the expense of maintaining duplicate inventories in other countries. The customer can benefit by paying only local shipping charges and getting a short delivery time consistently, overcoming the problems that may arise when different supply locations may differ in what they stock at a particular time and when individual packages need to clear customs.
This approach applies not only to spare parts and supplies such as consumables but to other goods and to shipments from any first country to any second country, or from one geographical area to another.